Telluride names a curator and keeps everything else a secret
While the rest of the fall circuit races to announce, Telluride hands its one public gesture to a guest programmer — Rebecca Hall — and refuses to say what she, or anyone, will show.
Essay · Festival circuit
Why festivals still matter in the streaming age
Streaming ate the theatrical window, but it never touched the gatekeeping. Why Cannes, Venice and Berlin still decide what cinema we'll be watching a year from now — including the films that end up on a platform.
Read the essay →Latest dispatches
Full archive →Venice programs the marathon and keeps it off the ballot
Venice 2026's non-fiction slate is stacked with films that run four, five, seven hours — and every one of them sits out of competition, which is the part worth reading.
San Sebastián opens its competition on a premiere it can actually own
By handing its opening night to a world-premiere competition title from Fatih Akin — and saving the borrowed prestige for Werner Herzog's tribute — San Sebastián shows what a late-fall festival can still control.
New York gathers the year's cinema and refuses to rank it
With its 32-film main slate now set, the New York Film Festival stakes its authority on the one thing the fall circuit has stopped doing — choosing, and declining to compete.
TIFF publishes a 293-film schedule — and still opens its clock on an auteur
With its full 2026 schedule now live at 293 titles, Toronto has become less a selection than a transit map — yet it still hands the festival's first frame, at nine in the morning, to Ryūsuke Hamaguchi.
San Sebastián lets a streaming series compete for the Golden Shell — and calls it a film
By seating Pablo Larraín's four-part Netflix series in the same competition as Mike Leigh's stated final film, San Sebastián has quietly redefined the unit it awards.